The Genius in my Basement

‘“Sacked” … let’s see,’ he turns to another page: ‘“let go”? “let fall”? “relinquish”? Aaah, “liberate”!’

‘But you were sacked. You had a job, and you lost it because your students refused to come to your lectures and you were always sitting on a …’

‘I was not sacked,’ he interrupts.

‘According to my source, your students left in geometrical progression. First you had sixteen, then the next week, eight, then four, and when you got down to the last one, he died.’

‘I was not sacked,’ repeats Simon firmly. ‘I did not have my contract renewed. Everyone would agree there is a significant difference. And please do not say I was always sitting on a bus.’

The most astounding mathematical prodigy of his generation did not get his contract renewed? A man who has the answer to the symmetries of the universe in his sights, dismissed like a Brighton coffee-shop waitress? ‘Sacked’, I call it. ‘Sacked’ in all but technical fuss.

But Mummy must not be told.

‘I am not prepared to sacrifice her feelings to satisfy your artistic sensibilities,’ Simon sniffs. ‘The situation you are trying to manufacture reminds me of something I read in one of Hans Eysenck’s popular psychology books. He describes a Victorian with the pseudonym Walter, the ambition of whose life seems to have been to have sex with as many females as he could.’

‘I hardly think …’

‘Eysenck then expresses this point of view to put it up to ridicule: “What do the feelings of all these females matter in comparison with the satisfaction of Walter’s artistic needs?” As I say, my mother and children must be the test.’

It is only now, recovered from the shock of Simon discovering me trespassing down here – a fact that he still appears not to have noticed – that I finally detect the flaw in his argument.

‘But Simon, your mother died nine years ago.’

‘The principle is the same.’

‘And you don’t have any children.’

This is not the first time Simon’s had cause to complain about my intrusions. When I was researching my first book (‘which I think will also be your last’) he made the mistake of popping his head round the door of my study while I was interviewing my then subject, and before Simon had a chance to scramble out of the room again, I’d snatched him into print.

‘Twice winner of a Mathematics Olympiad Gold Medal …’ I’d written as his footsteps fled, ‘my landlord is a generous, mild man, as brilliant as the sun, but a fraction odd.’

‘One fact to get right, and you got it wrong in four different ways,’ protests Simon now.

One: the International Mathematics Olympiad does not award medals or (mistake two) golds, it hands out numbers: 1, 2 and 3. Three: there is no such thing as a ‘winner’ in these competitions: it is mathematics, not sprinting. You get a 1 for achieving a certain score or above. It is perfectly possible for all contenders to get a 1. Mistake four: three times – not twice – Simon scored this top grade, aged fifteen, sixteen and seventeen, and (although Simon insists he has forgotten this) one of those wins was with a triumphant 100 per cent, a perfect flush, and another with 99 per cent, one of the first boys in the world ever to achieve this mind-frazzling triumph. Others have managed it since, but unlike Simon they have had years of dedicated training, entirely skipped their adolescence, and looked like beaten-up tapeworms.

In just half a page of a biography about someone else I managed to misrepresent Simon in four ways, when all he’d done was have the bad luck to stray into my sight for five minutes.

‘Four errors in half a page is, hnn, eight errors in a full page, which in a full-length publication such as you are threatening to make this one, comes to, aaah, 2,000 or 3,000 instances of disregard for fact. Oh dear!’ he sighs. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’

True to expectation, the howlers in this manuscript have already arrived. ‘What do you mean,’ he says, submerging his arms into his holdall, for a moment looking puzzled, then following after with his head, as if his bag is eating him. ‘What do you mean,’ he reappears with a clutch of papers – the first chapters, which I emailed him this morning – ‘that women have a habit of shrieking when they come across me?’

‘Unexpectedly, when you’re hovering next to my bathroom door. They do.’

‘It may have happened once,’ he permits. ‘I do not think that makes a habit. I do not think my mother …’

‘Your dead mother, Simon. It’s happened three times.’

It’s not his looks. It’s the way he hovers outside the door, waxen and quiet. He’s not there with any wicked purpose. He’s been pacing up and down the front hall, tearing at his post or contemplating points of infinity in hyperbolic space, and just happens to have reached that end of the corridor when the bathroom door opens. His fixed stare gives him the impression of having enormous eyes. Muttonchop whiskers billow up the side of his face, as though his blank smile contained a fire.

Clipping from the Daily Mail, found in a sorry state by the clothes closet, front room of the Excavation. Reconstructed by the biographer.

Sprouting under his nostrils is half an inch of bristle where his electric shaving machine – based on circular movement – doesn’t reach into the corners of his nose. His stillness suggests someone plotting ambushes on a safari, or one of those people who squat in ponds with weeds on their heads, shooting ducks.

The woman shrieks. Mid-shriek, Simon does nothing, as though he’s thumbtacked between two seconds. Only once the screams have died down into gurgles of relief and apologies does he shake himself free with a heave of breath.

‘Hnnn!’ he says.

‘Hnnnn,’ he repeats.

Relieved to have resolved the situation so deftly, he thumps downstairs to the Excavation.

Another error he has noticed in these sample pages: why do I say he smells of sardines in tomato sauce? They’re not sardines, they’re kippers. They may, on occasion, be mackerel. And in all cases he buys them in oil. He dislikes tomato sauce.

‘If I can’t say you smell of sardines in tomatoes,’ I retort, ‘can I say you smell of fatty headless fish?’

It’s essential to emphasise that in no sense of the term is Simon mad. He’s covered in facial hair and wears rotten shoes and trousers for the opposite reason: too much mental order. He burps; he makes elephant yawns without putting his hand over his mouth; he thinks you won’t mind knowing about the progress of his digestion; and he goes on long, sweaty walks then doesn’t change his clothes for a week. But what else can he do? Everybody is messy somehow, and there’s no other place for Simon to store his quota. Inside his head there’s no room: all the mess has been swept out. It’s as pristine in there as a surgeon’s operating theatre.

Another word he doesn’t like in my manuscript is ‘stomps’.

‘What do you mean, I “stomp”? How do you know I “stomp”? I don’t believe you can hear me from upstairs. You’re not suggesting I “stomp” on the ceiling, are you?’

As for my description of his floor … ‘Oh dear,’ he groans, conclusively.

Suddenly, Simon loses interest. Although his face has no time for expressions, his legs and arms want to get on with it. He starts to wiggle his hands; his head begins to rotate; then, without explanation, he drops the thesaurus on his bedcover, bolts from the bed, dodging a wave of Asda bags (‘Sainsbury’s, Alex. I find it enhances one’s appreciation of a book if the facts are correct’) and hurries to the kitchen, gripping his peck of peppered kippers. Through the connecting door, I watch his hair weave around the lightbulb like a grey feather-duster. A large, disjointed man, he can move with surprising litheness.

People such as Simon – unknown, living people – don’t trust words. Words may be a familiar method of communication (although Simon generally prefers grunts or showing off bus tickets), but that doesn’t mean it’s respectable to make a living out of them, especially if you’re a sloppy scribbler with a lighthearted attitude to truth like me. Words are too nuanced and potentially destructive to be left in the hands of someone so unrigorous. A straightforward four-letter noun beginning with f—

‘No!’

– defining your style of accommodation, and bang! The entire disciplinary force of Cambridge City Council rushes up the hill with clipboards to snap, tick and bylaw you into a magistrate’s court.

For Simon, the world is a leaky place. You have constantly to be on your guard against the seeping away or sudden disappearance of comfort. He imagines that this book (‘if it ever comes out’) will be ‘bedside reading’ for housing inspectors. He thinks they might run him out of the city.

If that’s what words can do when wrongly applied to a few cubic feet of basement air enclosed by bricks and bramble-bush-covered windows, what massacre will they perform on the central object of a full-length biography – which is a trillion misunderstandings-in-waiting – i.e. a living human being?

Simon says he doesn’t stomp. I say he does. Simon says he should know, since a) he does the non-stomping and b) he’s closer to his feet than I am.

‘But if you are stomping on the ceiling, then my ears are closer,’ I observe. ‘Biography – especially biography of an unknown person – is not and cannot be about reality.’ I follow after him to the kitchen. ‘It’s no more about reality than, say, say … minus numbers. And just as the solution to the problem of the impossible existence of minus numbers is to realise that they are not real things at all, but something you’ve done to positive numbers, i.e. you’ve “minus-ed” them – in short, minus numbers are verbs, not nouns – so in biography, it’s not the real subject, but the active, i.e. verbal, relationship between the biographer and subject that …’

‘Mathematicians do not think of negative numbers like that,’ interrupts Simon, tugging at the mackerel tin, which has somehow got wedged in his pocket. ‘We think of them as real objects. Exactly as real as positive numbers.’

‘The reason that a biography of an unknown person cannot be about reality,’ I continue regardless, ‘is because the reader will fall asleep. Reality is too bland. An ordinary person doesn’t have the dramatic and universally appreciated facts of the famous to rely on. They’ve only got the oddness and power of their character. So,’ I say, expanding my chest with the sudden conviction that I am going to be able to complete these sentences neatly, ‘a biography of the unknown has to be a biographer’s effort to interpret facts, his impression of the facts – what has been done to the facts by his brain. It’s about one person’s mumbled attempts vaguely to interpret what they dimly think they might have seen on a misty day in another person’s possible behaviour, but which they quite possibly haven’t; and any biographer who puts pen to paper claiming his motives are objectivity and truth is a fraud. Biography is not mathematics. It is not bus timetables. What matters is not whether or not you “stomp”, in fact, since who can know that as a fact, but that I think you stomp, and by the way, aren’t you supposed to take the sweetcorn out of the supermarket bag before you put the tin in boiling water?’

Squeak of a tap; the cymbal clatter of high-pressure liquid on thin cooking steel; the castanets and maracas of bubbles; muffled turbulence as the pot fills.

Simon’s wolfish. While we were trespassing through the rubbish in this basement, he’d been on a moonlit hike around the city distributing anti-car newsletters for an environmental campaign group called Transport 2000, and it’s emptied his belly. After buses and trains, the thing that matters most to him is his digestive tract.

Small headless fish are his favourite food. Except when in Montreal, Simon boils his kippers in the tin, ‘to save on washing up’. Kippers come in a different-sized tin in Canada, and ‘I don’t want to take the chance of doing something wrong.’ In Montreal he eats frozen fish in supermarket display packs – not because he prefers it, but because the label tells him what to do, which is comforting, although he never grills, ‘because you can’t see what’s going on’.